Dust+Storm

** Dust Storm **


 * "Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes ," (3). **

The dust that settles throughout the house and the city represents the depressiont that is hitting all of America. It is inescapable, no matter how hard one prepares or tries to avoid it. The houses represent the people that are being affected by this great economic downturn. They were completely closed up, yet the dust seemed to creep in and settle on every piece of furniture, every dish, and every other item in the house.

**"And then the dispossessed were drawn west- from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico; from Nevada and Arkansas, families, tribes, dusted out, tractored out. Car-loads, caravans, homeless and hungry; twenty thousand and fifty thousand and a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. They streamed over the mountains, hungry and restless - restless as ants, scurrying to find work to do - to lift, to push, to pull, to pick, to cut - anything, any burden to bear, for food. The kids are hungry. We got no place to live. Like ants scurrying for work, for food, and most of all for land."**

The highlighted section of this quote from //Grapes of Wrath// shows the great extent to which the depression was affecting America. It claims that two hundred thousand humble, farming families in America had to leave their previous homes and cross the country in search for a better life. This quote portrays the tractor as a new invention that is almost taking the place of the farmers. It was able to do the work of the farmer much more efficiently, therefore was much more useful to the owners of the land. The dust is still viewed as a crippling factor in each farmer's life. It was the depression that took its toll on the people of America.

**"In the roads where the teams moved, where the wheels milled the ground and the hooves of the horses beat the ground, the dirt crust broke and the dust formed " (2).**

A different way to interpret the constant interference of the dust throughout the story is to view the dust as a representation of the working farmer. There is a great amount of the dust and farmers alike, and both are pretty much unaccounted for. No other characters in the story bother to take any action against the dust, because there is nothing they can do to help themselves. Nobody bothered to help the poor farmers either, because the only ones who would be able to impact their situation were the rich land owners. They were a very selfish group, and didn't bother to spread equality amongst every social class.